Friday, February 4, 2011

Allan Kaprow explaining Household, a Happening prepared for
Cornell University, May 1964. He gave a lecture explaining the piece
the day before a Happening or Activity then followed it with
a workshop to discuss the results.

The artworld produces "stillborn art" wrote Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) in his "Happenings" in the New York Scene essay first published in 1961. He sought a venue more free for artists than "the white walls, the tasteful aluminum frames, the lovely lighting, fawn gray rugs, cocktails, polite conversation" of chic galleries and art museums. He wanted to blur art and life and coined the term Happenings ("Happenings are events that, put simply, happen") and came to realize that the world and everyday life should provide the backdrop for his Happenings. By the early 1960s, he located his "activities" in dumps, parking ramps, the street, courtyards, auditoriums, woods and orchestratraed them though a "score" mimeographed or handwritten. It was his pushing, his yearning to break down barriers between artist and audience that makes his work from some 50 years ago increasingly relevant today. In 2011 and the era of Web 2.0, artists design projects circumventing the art establislhment to involve online participants by providing instructions for what could more or less be described as performance-inflected works to be completed in the outside world. Many of these art projects such as Post Secret have been embraced by the mainstream. In 2005 artist Frank Warren began inviting people to participate by mailing him their secrets on a homemade postcard which he scanned and posted on blogspot. Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher's Learning to Love You More listed assignments, which participants could complete and until 2009submit for publication on their website. New York artist David Horvitz posted ideas"anyone can use without permission"on Tumblr suggesting activities such as making fake press passes to gain free admission to art museums. Even institutions, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art has invited the public to post portraits of photographers into a group pool on Flickr to coincide with their current Facing the Lens: Portraits of Photographers exhibition. Though Kaprow spoke against museums as more or less dead zones and resisted displaying his work, numerous museums have recently "reinvented" or "reinterpreted/reinvented" his "scores" including Fluids mounted by The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in 2008. Many of Kaprow's "scores" have been collected and published as documents from an archive in Allan Kaprow: Art as Life by Eva Meyer-Herman, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal (Getty 2008). The coffee table volume makes his pieces accessible to a new generation such as our Digital Processes students who "reinterpreted" Kaprow's Routine piece one wintry Wisconsin afternoon.